Difference between revisions of "Quotes"

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==public opinion does not exist==
==public opinion does not exist==
[[File:question 24 public opinion pierre Bourdieu.jpg|400px]]
[[File:question 24 public opinion pierre Bourdieu.jpg|400px]]
Also we discussed this Pierre Bourdieu:
Also we discussed this Pierre Bourdieu:
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👑 Firstly, not all people are capable of producing their opinion.
👑 Secondly, not all people's opinions are significant.
👑 Secondly, not all people's opinions are significant.

Revision as of 03:16, 10 September 2019


Some thoughts should never be conceived. Some questions should never be asked, because they have no answer, and the questions themselves serve only to haunt with grinding guilt and second-guessing. -- Slow Burn, Dead Fire (Zombie Book)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950) , Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"

"An opinion can be argued with; a conviction is best shot." - Lawrence of Arabia - http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0918-04.htm

кто не рискует, тот не пьет шампанского - There is no champagne without risk.[1]

"Jump and the net will appear"

“To know one country is to know none" - Seymour Martin Lipset, Sociologist

"No, I'm not a pessimist. At some point the world shits on everybody. Pretending it ain't shit makes you an idiot, not an optimist."[1]

What I don't like about Washington is people do not let you know how they feel. They're very nice to your face and then they take a shiv or a machete and they stab it in your back. I don't like it. I'm a Wall Street guy and I’m more of a front-stabbing person, and I would rather people tell directly how I feel about them than this sort of nonsense. - Scaramucci [2]

New to sort

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_(slang) in colleges:June 12, 2017

  • "But there is another view (about safe spaces) that is now ascendant … It’s a horrible view, which is that ‘I need to be safe ideologically, I need to be safe emotionally, I just need to feel good all the time. And if someone else says something that I don’t like, that is a problem for everyone else, including the administration.”


Williamson articulated the level of courage it can take to overcome the fear of allowing our outer life to reflect the power of which our inner life is aware:


your vibe attracts your tribe

One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. — Martin Luther King (1963)

In loving memory of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz and in deep appreciation of the trailblazer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

Be the change you want to see in the World -- Mahatma Gandhi

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter -- Martin Luther King


I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.-- Helen Keller

A person begins to live only when he manages to surpass himself. -- Albert Einstein Russian: Человек начинает жить лишь тогда, когда ему удается превзойти самого себя. --Альберт Эйнштейн


A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog. -- Jack London

The only constant in life is change

The greatest enemy to prejudice is travel - Mark Twain


"A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still." -- Benjamin Franklin.

Cognitive dissonance




--Chapter 12 By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus: A New Look at the Joseph Smith Papyri


-- William I.B. Beveridge, The Art of Scientific Investigation, 1957

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity (clamness) opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

--Albert Einstein


-- Bertrand Russell


--Alexis de Tocqueville

"In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either." --Mark Twain

Political repression in America…is American as apple pie

--American Inquisition: The Era of McCarthyism, Tape 9: Joe McCarthy and the Loss of China. Ellen Schrecker

"The lust for money may be distasteful, the desire for power ignoble, but neither will drive its devotees to the criminal excess of an idea on the march. Whether the idea is the triumph of the working class or of a master race, ideology leads to the graveyard." Corey Robin in the London Review of Books quoted here http://hnn.us/articles/24482.html

"Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, in what he called the law of the infinite cornucopia, stated that there was never a shortage of arguments to support any doctrine one wanted to believe in for whatever reasons."MICHAEL COOPER Parsing the Myths of the Midterm Election November 5, 2010

Beliefs never change

Adam Ruins Everything - Why Proving Someone Wrong Often Backfires

Your entire show's built around the idea that if you prevent someone with better information you can change their mind.

But the surprising truth is disproving a misconception can actually strengthen a person's belief in that misconception.

It's called the backfire effect.

The More you prove someone wrong the more they think they're right.

That can't be true I change people's minds every day.

You just proved my point I presented you with information that goes against you thinking and you just dug right into your beliefs. one study found that when people concerned about side effects with a flu shot were informed it was safe they actually became less willing to get it

but those so illogical how is it possible?

Because when you try to change someone’s mind the other person often feels attacked.

Being proven wrong actually activates the same area of the brain as real physical paint


World star

stay ?? you can. A right hook will hurt ya. But her right facts will too.

Being proven wrong hurts so much it often causes a fight-or-flight response

I gotta get out of here.

Nope you need to hear this

Why am i reacting like this? Normally I love learning new things

Simple you're protecting your identity. It’s called identity protective cognition






  • "But the surprising truth is, disproving a misconception can actually strengthen a person's belief in that misconception."
Craig Silverman. The Backfire Effect: More on the Press's Inability to Debunk Bad Information. * Columbia Journalism Review, 17 Jun 2011.
  • "One study showed that when people concerned about the side effects of the flu shot were informed that it was safe, they actually became less willing to get it."
Cari Romm. Vaccine Mythbusting can Backfire. * The Atlantic, 12 Dec 2014.
  • "Being proven wrong actually activates the same areas of the brain as real physical pain."
C. Nathan DeWall, Geoff MacDonald, Gregory D. Webster, Carrie L. Masten, Roy F. Baumeister, Caitlin Powell, David Combs, David R. Schurtz, Tyler F. Stillman, Dianne M. Tice, and Naomi I. Eisenberger. Acetaminophen Reduces Social Pain. * Psychological Science, 14 Jun 2010.
  • "But when the truth threatens their identity, they push back hard."
Maria Konnikova. I Don't Want To Be Right. * The New Yorker, 16 May 2014.
  • "When a fact contradicts our beliefs, we often hide behind emotional arguments that can't be disproven."
Troy Campbell. Why People Fly From Facts. * Scientific American, 3 Mar 2015.
  • "The "Backfire Effect" happens because our emotions are faster than logical thoughts."
Chris Mooney. The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science. * Mother Jones, May/Jun 2011.
  • "Finding out you're wrong is the first step toward one day being right."
Henry L. Roediger and Brigid Finn. Getting it Wrong: Surprising Tips on How To Learn. * Scientific American Mind, 20 Oct 2009.
  • "And people actually like you more if they see you screw up. It's called the 'Pratfall Effect.'"
John Tauer. Image is Everything: LeBron James and the Pratfall Effect. * Psychology Today, 22 Jul 2009.
  • "Doctors who are honest about their errors are more likely to have more trusting patients, not fewer."
Kathleen M. Mazor, George W. Reed, Robert A. Yood, Melissa A. Fischer, Joann Baril and Jerry H. Gurwitz. Disclosure of Medical Errors: What Factors Influence How Patients Respond? * The Journal of General Internal Medicine, 21 (7), Jul 2006.
  • Wikipedia: Confirmation bias - Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.

Bible versus

John 4:18: There is no fear in love, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love.


Hope in the face

Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything..jpg

Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.


There are moments in life when you must act even though you cannot carry your best friends with you. The still small voice within you must always be the final arbiter when there is a conflict of duty. -- Mahatma Gandhi


To ignore evil is to become accomplice to it -- Martin Luther King





If you are neutral on situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor - Desmond Tutu

Hope in the face of conflict, overwhelming odds, and almost universal distain

About hope in the face of conflict, overwhelming odds, and almost universal distain, quotes:

--Excerpt from the book: The Middle Mind Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves by Curtis White http://www.thirdworldtraveler.</wbr>com/America/Middle_Mind.html


--From Against Discouragement
FOURTH QUOTE: The struggle for justice should never be abandoned on the ground that it is hopeless, because of the apparent overwhelming power of those in the world who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to their power. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, and patience—whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa; peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam; or workers and intellectuals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. No cold calculation of the balance of power should deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.
--From Declarations of Independence Chapter 11: The Ultimate Power page 279
FIFTH QUOTE: “As Adam Hochschild points out, from the time the English Quakers first took on the issue of slavery, three quarters of a century passed before it was abolished it in Europe and America. Few if any working on the issue at the beginning lived to see its conclusion, when what had once seemed impossible suddenly began to look, in retrospect, inevitable.” “The African writer Laurens Van Der Post once said that no great new leaders were emerging because it was time for us to cease to be followers.”
--From the Excellent Article: TomDispatch:Rebecca Solnit on hope in dark times

Another quote: “a number of famous mainland Chinese dissidents find themselves in the paradoxical position of a backyard bush that blooms on the neighbour’s side of the wall: enjoying great international fame but not recognised by the general public in their own country, known only within a small circle of people”.[2]

Alexis de Tocqueville

Also see: Tocqueville

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. The Americans, in their intercourse with strangers, appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise...They unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties they fall to praising themselves. It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes. It seems, at first sight, as if all the minds of the Americans were formed upon one model, so accurately do they correspond in their manner of judging. A stranger does, indeed, sometimes meet with Americans who dissent from these rigorous formularies; with men who deplore the defects of the laws, the mutability and the ignorance of democracy; who even go so far as to observe the evil tendencies which impair the national character, and to point out such remedies as it might be possible to apply; but no one is there to hear these things besides yourself, and you, to whom these secret reflections are confided, are a stranger and a bird of passage. They are very ready to communicate truths which are useless to you, but they continue to hold a different language in public. In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom. The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through. An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting... As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

Biography of Alexis de Tocqueville Download Tocqueville's three books for free: Democracy in America — Volume 1 Democracy in America — Volume 2American Institutions and Their Influence

Albert Einstein


--Albert Einstein


--Albert Einstein (From Comments on Chomsky's web blog)

I MADE ONE great mistake in my life, Albert Einstein admitted, when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made...

--Albert Einstein Hiroshima: A Mistake and A Crime


Zinn quotes Kissinger in his first chapter, on page 9: ""History is the memory of states," wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen's policies. From his standpoint, the "peace" that Europe had before the French Revolution was "restored" by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere, except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation -- a world not restored but disintegrated."



---Source: Talk titled "American Foreign Policy" Naom Chomsky at Harvard University (http://www.chomsky.info/talks</wbr>/19850319.htm), March 19, 1985


--Source: American Power and the New Mandarins, 1969 Naom Chomsky
Wikiquote on Chomsky http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/N</wbr>oam_Chomsky Wikipedia on Chomsky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N</wbr>oam_Chomsky

20th century bogymen

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power."---Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Fascist Dictator of Italy


--Hermann Goering, Nazi leader, at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II

In a memorable insight, Rebecca Solnit has suggested that the successes of social movements should often be measured not by their accomplishments, but by the disasters they prevent:


The Iraqi resistance, one of the least expected and most powerful social movements of recent times, can lay claim to few positive results. In two years of excruciating (if escalating) fighting, the insurgents have seen their country progressively reduced to an ungovernable jungle of violence, disease, and hunger. But maybe, as Solnit suggests, their real achievement lies in what didn't happen. Despite the deepest desires of the Bush administration, to this day Iran remains uninvaded -- the horrors of devolving Iraq have, so far, prevented the unleashing of the plagues of war on its neighbor

--Tom Dispatch: The Ironies of Conquest

American Sociology

As Ed the Sock said last night, politicians are just a reflection of society. We don't want unpleasant truths, and demand to be lied to so as to feel better, and then complain when things don't work out perfectly. George Carlin also blames the American people for the problems with politicians, as they all come from American schools, churches, families, exposed to the same media and then voted on by their peers. Society creates the hated politician, who then pretends to be liked to sell you a product, just like cat food or laundry detergent. (http://www.thecommentary.ca/a</wbr>rchives/20040701.html Where is the George Carlin quote?)

"What should one write to ruin an adversary? The best thing is to prove that he is not one of us -- the stranger, alien, foreigner. To this end we create the category of the true family. We here, you and I, the authorities, are a true family. We live in unity, among our own kind. We have the same roof over our heads, we sit at the same table, we know how to get along with each other, how to help each other out. Unfortunately, we are not alone."

--Ryszard Kapuscinski in Shah of Shahs

“…in Britain, empire was justified as a benevolent "white man's burden." And in the United States, empire does not even exist; "we" are merely protecting the causes of freedom, democracy, and justice worldwide.”

--The Editors, "After the attacks…the war on terrorism", Monthly Review, 53, 6, Nov., 2001. P 7


--Eric Foner rejecting the arguments that "Trying to understand the 9/11 terrorists grievances is treasonous"

“When we are reduced to insisting that our depravity isn't as bad as the other guy's, we have fallen deep into a pit of moral equivalence that reveals what we have lost."

--Their Humiliation, and Ours The U.S. was forced to see itself as the world does — and it was painful to behold Time magazine Monday, May. 17, 2004


--Reinhold Niebuhr

"ALL empires die of indigestion," said Napoleon. They do. They bite off more than they can chew, swallow territories their colonial systems can't digest, and die. --The empire that is dead The Herald (Glasgow) August 1, 1996

Kerry will change his views to fit the facts; Bush will change the facts to fit his views

--Hillary Clinton in the 2004 race.


--Emma Goldman.


--Mark Twain

"...people believe that "imperialism" won out for military reasons. Osborne shows convincingly that commerce won out instead. America...seen as an "economic imperialist nation."

--The Christian Century book review of Annexation Hawaii

Tens of millions of Americans, who neither know nor understand [their own country’s bloody historical struggle for the material benefits they all enjoy today], march in the army of the night with their Bibles held high. And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason.

–-Alteration of a quote by Isaac Asimov

43% of Americans have not read a book in the last year.

-- According to the National Endowment for the Arts on the 2002 US Census Bureau statistics http://www.usatoday.com/news/e</wbr>ducation/2004-07-08-reading-st</wbr>udy_x.htm


-- http://www.constitutioncenter.</wbr>org/CitizenAction/CivicResearc</wbr>hResults/NCCTeens'Poll.shtml

The greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government.

---Martin Luther King, Jr.

Pentagon briefers told President Johnson that the true U.S. goals in Vietnam were, “70% to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat; 20% to keep South Vietnam (and adjacent territories) from Chinese hands; 10% to permit the people of Vietnam a better, freer way of life.”

-- Robert Freeman: Is Iraq Another Vietnam? Actually, It May Become Worse

My kind of loyalty is loyalty to one's country and not to one's institutions or officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing to watch over. Its institutions and clothing can wear out and become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags, that is a loyalty of unreason.' This is important because in the present discussion boundaries have been set, lines have been drawn. Those who go outside those boundaries and criticize official policy are called unpatriotic and disloyal. When they accuse dissenters of that they have forgotten the meaning of loyalty and patriotism. Patriotism does not mean support for your government. It means, as Mark Twain said, support for your country. --Howard Zinn, from the Artists in a Time of War CD

Where the "Disneyland" Quote comes from:

Leftists like to explain the disaffection of working-class people with public education as a natural reaction to the patriotism, conformity, and civility pushed by what they call the “ideological state apparatus.” The object of education, according to this view, is to police class boundaries by transforming most kids into a unquestioning drones while selecting a small number of others for management positions. Kids from blue-collar homes are supposed to know intuitively that this is the case, and they respond accordingly, cutting class and getting high and listening to The Wall over and over again. A more nuanced version of this critique, the 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me, points out that high school American history textbooks give ”a Disney version of history”: heroic, egalitarian, jam-packed with progress, and almost entirely free of class conflict. Teaching such an “Officer Friendly” account of reality, the author concludes, is merely to “make school irrelevant to the major issues of the day.” The kids know bullshit when they see it.
The disaffection of the Kansas conservatives with public education is almost precisely the opposite. They do not have a problem with the idea that schools should be designed to churn out low-wage workers; indeed, Kay O’Connor (A conservative Kansas state senator) told me that was a worthy goal. The Cons (conservative wing of the Republican party) are pissed off because they think the schools don’t provide enough Disney, enough Officer Friendly. --What's the Matter with Kansas?

piracy is not theft

Piracy is not theft.jpg


“Walter Lippmann painstakingly demonstrated why no individual, however intelligent, educated, and motivated, was capable of becoming an expert, let alone being an "insider," on all the important issues of the day.

--Ignorance of the world has deep historical and cultural roots in the US

The media makes politics out to be "liberal" vs. "conservative" when in fact the real model is Corporate America vs. Everyone Else.


The media do not necessarily tell your what to think, but they tell you what to think about, and how to think about it.

--The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism Robert McChesney

It is often noted that democracy requires journalism; what is less frequently emphasized is that journalism requires democracy. Unless there is strong political culture there will be little demand for excellent journalism.

--The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism Robert McChesney

A politician stands a far greater chance to become the object of news media scrutiny if she or he is rumored to have not paid 10 parking tickets or if they failed to pay a bar bill than if they used their power to quietly funnel billions of public dollars to powerful special interests.

--The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism Robert McChesney

A five year study of investigative journalism on TV news completed in 2002 determined that investigative journalism has all but disappeared on the nation’s commercial airwaves.

--The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism Robert McChesney

In view of the fact that legitimate sources tend to be restricted to political and economic elites, this bias sometimes makes journalists appear to be stenographers to those in power; i.e. exactly what one would expect in an authoritarian society with little or no formal press freedom.

--The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism Robert McChesney

This focus on government malfeasance and neglect of corporate misdeeds plays directly into the hands of those who wished to give more power and privileges to corporations, and undermine the ability of government to regulate in the public interest. As Ed Baker observes, professional practices, along with libel laws, “favor exposing governmental rather than private (corporate) wrongdoing”

--The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism Robert McChesney

If the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped steadily for twenty years it would be front page and leading broadcast news day after day until the government took action. That 32 million of our population have their housing, food, and clothing “index” drop steadily for more than 30 years is worth only an occasional feature story about an individual or statistical fragments in the back pages of our most influential news organizations.

--Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly


--Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity Edited by Michael Lewis

American economy

we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3 of its population. Our real task...is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.... -- George F. Kennan

Miscellaneous quotes

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us" --"The latern on the stern" The Economist, January 3, 2009, p 65. From On the Constitution of the Church and State By Samuel Taylor Coleridge



The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

-- Somerset Maugham

"It used to be believed that every event in the world-the opening of a morning glory...was due to direct microintervention by the Deity. The flower was unable to open by itself.God had to say “Hey, flower, open.” [Today]...because we know something about phototropism and plant hormones, we can understand the opening of the morning glory independent of divine mícrointervention...As we learn more and more about the universe, there seems less and less for God to do."

--Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science by Carl Sagan, page 334-335

"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis"

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A man in life has many disciples, but it is always Judas who writes the biography."

--Oscar Wilde

"In our time, political speech and writing is largely the defense of the indefensible."

--George Orwell


--Guardian: It's Greed, Not Ideology, that Rules the White House By Naomi Klein
Anastasio Somoza Debayle, brutal American puppet dictator of Nicaragua.

"The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes." --Justice Felix Frankfurter [3]

"So long to the dreams that make men free." -James Miska, Pendleton Revisited


"Pride is a form of selfishness." -David Lawrence

US in Central America

What we see in Central America today would not be much different if Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union did not exist

--US Ambassador to Panama Ambler Moss, 1980


The US became staunchly anti-revolutionary after its own revolution The United States has countered [Central American] revolutions with its military power. Washington's recent policy, this book argues, is historically consistent for two reasons: first, for more than a century (if not since 1790), North Americans have been staunchly antirevolutionary; and second, U.S. power has been the dominant power outside (and often inside) force shaping the societies against with Central Americans have rebelled. ... Washington officials have opposed radical change not because of pressure from public opinion. Throughout the twentieth century, the overwhelming number of North Americans could not have identified each of the five Central American nations on a map, let alone ticked off the region's sins that called for an application of U.S. force. The United States consistently feared and fought such change because it was a status quo power. It wanted stability, benefited from the ongoing system, and was therefore content to work with the military oligarchy complex that ruled most of Central America from the 1820ss to the 1980s. The world's leading revolutionary nation in the eighteenth century became the leading protector of the status quo in the twentieth century. Such protection was defensible when it meant protecting the more equitable societies of Western Europe and Japan, but became questionable when it meant bolstering poverty and inequality in Central America.

--Page 12, 13, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (The footnote states: This is argued in Eldon Kenworthy, “Reagan Rediscovers Monroe”, democracy 2 (July 1982): 80-90

US president’s racism and lust for empire Thomas Jefferson…interest in Latin America was extraordinary (he once remarked that young empire-builders should first study Spanish) Thomas Jefferson…concern about expanding U.S. power even led him in the 1780s to decide that it would be better if the Spanish held on to their territory “till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain if from them piece by piece”…His [belief in] Manifest Destiny…was shared by most of the other Founders, including Jefferson’s great political rival, Alexander Hamilton.

--Page 19 Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America

Theodore Roosevelt…the famed Rough Rider, who fought publicly…in Cuba during the 1898 war…called Latin Americans “Dagoes” because they were incapable of either governing themselves or—most important in Roosevelt’s hierarchy of values—maintaining order.

--Page 34 Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America

The US intervenes in Central America to bestow the blessings of stability myth That the United States intervened in Central America simply to stop revolutions and bestow the blessings of stability tells too little too simply. The motive for Washington’s policy in Central America was not to stop upheavals, but to promote U.S. interests. In El Salvador, for example, North Americans—both in the business and the diplomatic community—continually encouraged a revolutionary faction between 1906 and 1913 because they knew the faction was more pro-United States (and anti-European capital) than the actual, legitimate government. Interests and imperial rivalry, not morality and consistency, drove U.S. policies.

--Page 39 Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America

The 1907 Central American Court The 1907 Washington conference spun a web of agreements that were to make Central Americans more interdependent and—as the North American Progressives theorists of the time believed—more peaceful and cooperative. The meetings established a Central American Court of Justice…Future disputes were to go not to the battlefield, but the Court. The Central American Court quickly became the global symbol for the Progressives’ growing faith in legal arbitration for the settlement of disputes. One North American proudly wrote, “To the powers of Europe, to the great powers of the world who struggled with partial success…to establish a court of arbitral justice, the young republics of Central America may recall the scriptural phrase, ‘A little child shall led them.’” Retired steel billionaire Andrew Carnegie happily gave $100,000 for a building to house the Court. It turned out to be one of Carnegie’s few bad investments. Within nine years the institution was hollow because twice—in 1912 and 1916—the United states refused to recognize Court decisions that went against its interests in Nicaragua. The North Americans destroyed the Court they had helped to create, and in doing so vividly demonstrated how the Progressive faith in legal remedies was worthless when the dominant power in the area paced its own national interest over international legal institutions.

--Page 41-42 Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America


El Salvador...is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts. Central America is simply too close, and the strategic stakes are too high, for us to ignore the danger of governments seizing power there with ideological and military ties to the Soviet Union. -- American President Ronald Reaga[2]

The United States, said Ronald Reagan, "is engaged in a war on terrorism, a war for freedom" How familiar it all sounds. Merely replace Soviet Union and communism with al-Qaeda, and you are up to date. And it was all a fantasy.[3]

My quotes

The stark difference between two of the three boogeymen of the twentieth century, Moa and Stalin and the United States is that we don't kill our own populations, we just kill everyone else's. From here

Need to work on:

  • In the marketplace of ideas some people are pickpockets. (basically some people have nothing to contribute in an argument/debate/conversation)


  • As for those [who died] in the World Trade Center... they were civilians [which] formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire - the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved - and they did so both willingly and knowingly...To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in - and in many cases excelling at - it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective,...way of visiting some penalty...I'd really be interested in hearing about it. [They were "little Eichmanns"] Ward Churchill

  • I think the U.S. government enjoys playing with the stomachs of humanity.-- A Nicaraguan Mother
  • “If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care” Nelson Mandela just before the invasion of Iraq, Columbia Broadcasting System 2003.
  • "We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth." -- New York Times columnist Sydney Schanberg, during the Gulf War. Beginning of documentary, War Made Easy - How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death. (Sydney Schanberg warned journalists not to forget "our unquestioning chorus of agreeability when Lyndon Johnson bamboozled us with his fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident." Schanberg blamed not only the press but also "the apparent amnesia of the wider American public.")
  • Barbra Lee, Sept. 14, 2001: “However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint, Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control. And, she said: “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” The only politician who voted against giving war powers to Bush for invading Afghanistan. (Senate: 98 to 0, House 420 to 1)
immaculate Genocide

Writing of the holocaust perpetrated by U.S. troops in the Philippines a century ago--an onslaught entailing orders that every male Filipino over the age of ten be slaughtered, and the resulting deaths of one in every six inhabitants on the island of Luzon113--historian Stuart Creighton Miller describes "the tendency of highly patriotic Americans...to [vociferously] deny such abuses and even to assert that they could never exist in their country."114 The pattern is unmistakably similar to that exhibited by severe alcoholics who, despite all evidence of the damage their behavior has caused, chronically insist that "the opposite of everything is true."115

More subtle than the characteristic refusal of "conservatives" to allow mere facts to in any way alter their core presumptions was/is the complementary nature of the "alternative" interpretation(s) most often posed by their "progressive" opponents. Noting that the Philippines genocide was a matter of public knowledge by 1901,116 Creighton Miller goes on to observe that collective "amnesia over the horrors of the war of conquest...set in early, during the summer of 1902."117 He then concludes by reflecting upon how "anti-imperialists aided the process by insisting that the conflict and its attendant atrocities had been the result of a conspiracy by a handful of leaders who carried out, through deceit and subterfuge, the policy and means of expansion overseas against the will of the majority of their countrymen."118

"By refusing to acknowledge that most Americans had been bitten by the same bug that afflicted Roosevelt, Lodge, and Beveridge, anti-imperialists were letting the people off the hook and in their own way preserving the American sense of innocence. Unfortunately, the man in the street shared the dreams of world-power status, martial glory, and future wealth that would follow expansion. When the dream soured, the American people neither reacted with very much indignation, nor did they seem to retreat to their cherished political principles. If anything, they seemed to take their cues from their leader in the White House by first putting out of mind all the sordid episodes in the conquest, and then forgetting the entire war itself."119

So it was then, the more so today. Contemporary conservatives, whenever they can be momentarily boxed into conceding one or another unsavory aspect of America's historical record, are forever insisting that whatever they've admitted can be "properly" understood only when viewed as an "exception to the rule," an "aberration," "atypical" to the point of "anamolousness."120 None have shown a readiness to address the question of exactly how many such "anomalies" might be required before they can be said to comprise "the rule" itself. When pressed, conservatives invariably retreat into a level of diversionary polemic excusable at best on elementary school playgrounds, arguing that anything "we have done is somehow excused by allegations that "they" have done things just as bad."121

Progressives, on the other hand, while acknowledging many of America's more reprehensible features, have become far more refined in offering hook-free analyses than they were in 1902. No longer much preoccupied with such crudities as "conspiracy theory,"122 they have become quite monolithic in attributing all things negative to handy abstractions like "capitalism," "the state," "structural oppression," and, yes, "the hierarchy."123 Hence, they have been able to conjure what might be termed the "miracle of immaculate genocide," a form of genocide, that is, in which--apart from a few amorphous "decision-making elites"124--there are no actual perpetrators and no one who might "really" be deemed culpable by reason of complicity. The parallels between this "cutting edge" conception and the defense mounted by postwar Germans--including the nazis at Nuremberg--are as eerie as they are obvious.


  • Thanksgiving is an emotional holiday. People travel thousands of miles to be with people the only see once a year. And discover once a year is way too often. –Johnny Carson.

External links

Hundreds more liberal quotes:

Two legal systems

Anyone who is poor knows there are two legal systems: A corrupt legal system for the poor and one for everyone else.™

At the Bailey Law Firm justice is not an abstract term.

It's something we create everyday for our clients.

Lawyers suck The law profession should be called the "fear profession".

A person will come to an attorney either with a current legal problem (fear) or a potential legal problem (fear).

Attorneys usually will then create even more fear, then they tell the lay person to "trust me" they alone know what this afraid person can do to stop this fear. It is a wonderful way that attorneys personally enrich themselves. It is yet another example of the corrupting influence of money in American society.

In all of our dealings with other lawyers we have paid, we cannot think of a single time in which an attorney has stepped back and said, this maybe technically illegal, but the chances of you being prosecuted are infinitesimally small.

Again and again, we have paid an attorney to tell us the most expensive options available which would get them the most money. These attorneys will intentionally leave out free or low costs options which don't involve paying them.

There is a good reason why everyone hates lawyers. Attorneys suck.

Is our legal offices any different? We would sure like to think so. Contact us to find out.

Corporations: an era of corruption

[Picture: Presidental prophecy.jpg]


How we work From 80 to 92 percent of all cases settle.

There are two courts: a court of law and a court of public opinion.

If you can't get justice in traditional court, you can assuredly get justice by publicizing a corporation's bad acts.

Our goal is to get you compensation as quickly and painlessly as possible. We do this by threatening to publish the organizations bad acts on the internet. If they do not settle within two weeks, we viciously destroy their reputation.

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How America silents dissent


--Alexis de Tocqueville


The Overton window

Also known as the window of discourse, is the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

The Spiral of Silence

Public opinion spiral of silence elisabeth noelle neumann.jpg

By Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann

👑 People who see that the dominant social attitudes contradict their own position, “fall silent”, to avoid expressing their point of view, because they are afraid to be in the minority.

👑 The more prevalent the prevailing point of view seems to them, the more they “fall silent”.

public opinion does not exist

Question 24 public opinion pierre Bourdieu.jpg

Also we discussed this Pierre Bourdieu:

Public opinion does not really exist, for the following reasons:


👑 Secondly, not all people's opinions are significant.

The Dunning Kruger effect. The dumber you are the smarter you think you are


Crimes of Obama and Hillary Clinton by Adam Saleh.[3]

  1. http://shitmydadsays.com/
  2. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=41034
  3. [http://thewe.cc/weplanet/news/americas/us/ronald_reagan.html The Real Ronald Reagan, personal website